Announcement of Classes: Fall 2022

Reading and Composition: “Alternative realities are true”: Animist Materialism in Contemporary Literature from West Africa and its Diaspora

English R1A

Section: 1
Instructor: Gamedze, Londiwe
Time: MWF 9-10
Location: Wheeler 122

Book List

Oyeyemi, Helen: The Icarus Girl; Oyeyemi, Helen: White is for Witching

Description

Almost forty years ago, the pop star Madonna sang that “we are living in a material world, and I am a material girl.” But is this really a material world? And are we only material beings? While Madonna’s claim is a response to capitalism’s demand to accumulate material wealth, it also references the materialist philosophies and ‘evidence-based’ knowledge practices that are central to modern Euro-American common sense. But this materialist approach is not universal: throughout history, humans have claimed that reality includes spiritual or non-material dimensions whose existence cannot be accounted for by western science. This is true even in the west—consider the recent TikTok trend of 'reality shifting,' or the popularity of '5D consciousness'.

This course considers the entanglement of the spiritual and material realms in fiction from two contemporary Nigerian authors, Helen Oyeyemi and Ben Okri, whose work explores this entanglement in a modern world marked by migration and diasporic dislocation, cultural multiplicity, and the discrediting of indigenous knowledge and belief systems. We will be guided by Nigerian scholar Harry Garuba’s influential paper “Explorations in Animist Materialism: Notes on Reading/Writing African Literature, Culture, and Society,” which considers how African animist materialisms are compatible with other materialist philosophies, including the historical materialism of Marxist thought.

The course, whose title is taken from a short story by Ben Okri, will encourage us to think with—and not against—the alternative realities presented in animist texts from Africa and beyond. Our thinking will take place in class discussions and in writing. Students will submit short pieces and writing exercises as part of a portfolio, engage in peer review processes, and craft one centerpiece. Some class time will be reserved for writing and workshopping. Creative exploration in critical writing will be encouraged!

Reading and Composition: Millennial Narratives

English R1A

Section: 3
Instructor: Lackey, Ryan
Time: MWF 11-12
Location: SOCS180

Book List

Adjei-Brenyah, Nana Kwame: Friday Black; Rooney, Sally: Normal People

Description

“how long can a culture persist without the new? What happens if the young are no longer capable of producing surprises?”
—Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism

“The air we breathe is toxic, the water we drink is full of microplastics, and our food is contaminated by cancerous Teflon chemicals. Our quality of life is in decline, and along with it, the quality of aesthetic experience available to us. ”
—Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You?

Does "millennial" mean anything anymore? Has its significance been so thoroughly flattened by Our Cultural Discourse that it points not to a wobbily defined generation but to everything, and also to nothing? For our purposes, we'll consider "millennial" not as a demographic but as an aesthetic, a sensibility—a vibe. By looking closely at narratives that have been called, or seem somehow as, millennial—a novel, a collection of stories, a film, a videogame, and an Internet text (plus other, smaller things)—we'll ask a set of questions: what does it mean and feel like to be young (whatever that means) right now? How does the millennial aesthetic interact with identity categories like gender, race, sexuality, and age? How have contemporary narratives changed their form to respond to changes in American culture? How do these narratives address material problems (precarious capitalism, climate crises, structural identity inequities) alongside social, emotional, and spiritual anxieties (loneliness, alienation, anhedonia)?

Because this is an R1A course, our goals prioritize the development of your writing practice, in the sense of a creative, vocational, spiritual, or otherwise serious and expressive practice. Good writing does not occur when a prefabricated form has been mastered, when a set of repeatable moves have been memorized. Good writing, solid essays, strong voice, creative argumentation—all these come about through experimentation, failure, collaboration, a willingness to feel and stumble around inside the process of writing. In this course, you will always write for a reason, for a certain audience. You won’t just pretend to do writing that other people will see—you will literally do it.

In this course, we will be working critics. We will think and write together about recent texts and contemporary life.

Reading and Composition: “Minorities, Yes; But Oppressed, No”: Asian American Racialization from "Yellow Peril" to the "Model Minority Myth" and Beyond; or, Racialization & Representation in the Construction of Asian American Identity

English R1A

Section: 4
Instructor: Dowling, Rumur
Time: MWF 12-1
Location: Wheeler 122

Book List

Hagedorn (Editor), Jessica: Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction; Kingston, Maxine Hong: China Men; Lee, Chang-Rae: Native Speaker; Nguyen, Viet Thanh: The Refugees

Description

This class intends to take a historical approach to studying the racial formation of Asians and Asian Americans in the United States since the late nineteenth century. Asian American historiography has often been concerned with delineating the contours of the Asiatic immigrant’s journey in this country from one position to another: from inadmissible and inassimilable alien associated with social and economic menace (the so-called “Yellow Peril” of the early 20^th century) to a domesticated emblem of upward socioeconomic mobility (the so-called “Model Minority” emerging out of the 1960s).

This class seeks to identify the historical conditions, structures, and patterns underlying these hegemonic representational tropes and epistemological modes. This approach aims at unearthing continuities between the apparent transformations, oscillations, and idiosyncracies of Asiatic racial formation. It also aims at attending to the specificities of minority and marginalized representation – especially the “truth” or “evidence” of individual expression, experience, and agency – in order to discern the shared socio-cultural terrain, historical conditions, and representational tools and tropes that make these expressions possible and mediate our reception of them.

As an R1A course, this class is designed to help students cultivate skills in close and critical reading and in developing and articulating persuasive and elegant arguments about social, cultural, political, and aesthetic issues in writing.

Front Matter:

“Minorities, Yes; But Oppressed, No”: Asian American Racialization from "Yellow Peril" to the "Model Minority Myth" and Beyond; or, Racialization & Representation in the Construction of Asian American Identity

English R1A Section 4 (Fall 2022) ✵ MWF 12:10 – 1:00 ✵ Wheeler 122

GSI: Rumur Dowling

Email: rumur_dowling@berkeley.edu

OH: F 1:10 – 2:00 @ Sather's Cross Path Picnic Tables (North of Dwinelle Hall) or by Zoom Appointment

Reading and Composition: Poetry of Protest

English R1A

Section: 5
Instructor: Haas, Andrew J
Time: MWF 1-2
Location: DWIN189

Description

This Rhetoric and Composition course examines protest poetry in the United States as a social phenomenon and literary tradition from the nineteenth century to the present. We will explore and think critically about “protest poetics” in its various shapes and forms, from the spirituals of the enslaved to the chants of mass demonstrations, from popular poems circulated in newspapers to avant-garde head-scratchers. Alongside these poems, we’ll interact with contextual materials from a wide range of media: comic books, manifestos, commercials, folk songs, performance art, leaflets, documentary films, chapbooks, and more.

Because this is a Rhetoric and Composition course, our central priority will be to develop effective reading, note-taking, and composition skills for college writing. Half of our time will be spent examining and practicing the basic skills involved in the writing of thesis-driven essays, including summary, analysis, thesis construction, and text citation.

Reading and Composition

English R1A

Section: 6
Instructor: No instructor assigned yet.
Time:
Location:

Reading and Composition: Circe: Interpretations of A Witchy Woman

English R1A

Section: 7
Instructor: Funderburg, Katie
Time: MWF 2-3
Location: EVAN7

Book List

Miller, Madeline: Circe

Description

“Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep.” --Madeline Miller, Circe

Although Madeline Miller’s 2018 novel, Circe, recently prompted new interest in the witch of Aeaea, Circe has been a source of creative inspiration for thousands of years. As we will explore throughout this semester, poets and painters, short story writers and novelists alike have interpreted the character from a variety of perspectives. In this course, we will use Circe and the numerous works she has inspired to explore how gender, agency, cruelty, and grief are represented and intersect across both historical periods and genres. We will progress in a roughly chronological manner, starting with Homer’s Odyssey and texts from the Middle Ages, then working our way through poetry and prose ranging from the 17^th to 21^st centuries, and concluding with the novel Circe.

This is a writing-intensive course whose ultimate objective is to cultivate students’ analytical thinking and writing skills. To this end, we will spend a significant amount of time discussing how to productively engage with texts and effectively express observations and arguments in our own writing. Additionally, through the peer review workshops and the process of moving from a draft to a final paper, we will practice how to give and receive feedback constructively.

Reading and Composition: Madwomen

English R1A

Section: 8
Instructor: Karczmar, Naima
Time: MWF 3-4
Location: SOCS180

Book List

Chopin, Kate: The Awakening; Larsen, Nella: Passing; Morrison, Toni: Beloved; Plath, Sylvia: The Bell Jar

Description

Madness often takes shape in literature as a kind of shattering, a disillusionment or awakening that leaves fragmented subjectivity in its wake. The figure of the madwoman in particular has been of vital importance to feminist thought in twentieth century literature and philosophy. Theorists from Foucault to Gilbert and Gubar have sought to understand the ways in which hysteria functions as an oppressively gendered category. In literature, writers like Kate Chopin, Nella Larsen, Sylvia Plath, and Toni Morrison have painted dazzling portraits of women whose complex, fractured subjectivity resists and complicates the tropes passed down from previous centuries. This course asks what happens when madness is gendered. We will use our time together to ask what limits are imposed on feminine subjectivity, how we might interrogate those demarcations, whether and when madness constitutes a threat to power. Our shared texts will span a range of twentieth century fiction with female protagonists who are frequently read as “mad,” either because they are driven to insanity by their circumstances or because their view of the world is out of step with normative expectations—or both. The syllabus includes secondary source material that will provide a critical lens to aid us in thinking through the figure of the hysterical woman in terms of race and class as well as gender. To that end, we will engage selected criticism from Marxism, Feminism, and Black Studies.

This is a writing-intensive course designed to familiarize you with the basic elements of critical reading and writing. Students will write, workshop, and revise papers throughout the semester, with a portion of class time devoted to the practical components of drafting an academic essay.

Reading and Composition: My Brilliant Friend: Reading Female Friendship

English R1A

Section: 9
Instructor: Chaudhuri, Uttara Chintamani
Time: MWF 4-5
Location: DWIN233

Book List

Austen, Jane: Emma; Chattopadhay, Bankim Chandra: Rajmohan's Wife; Ferrante, Elena: My Brilliant Friend; Woolf, Virginia: A Room of One's Own

Description

While popular media has commented on the recent emphasis on female friendship in literary fiction, the phenomenon has elided scholarly attention. In this course, we will both interrogate and think beyond the question of appeal: as a particular encounter with otherness and therefore a site of political negotiation, what are the literary and political implications of contemporary female friendship? Before we approach the precarious field of the “present” cultural moment, we will go back in time to examine how, over the long arc of literary history, female friendship appears, glimmers, or lurks beneath various modes of literary fiction. We will consider the implications of female friendship for the politics of gender, but also—given the ceaseless deployment of friendship and enmity in political discourse—for larger questions of political being. Simultaneously, we will explore female friendship as a formal category, examining how the verbal or visual language in which female friendship is expressed allows us to think about the narrative principles of the texts/films/paintings we will be looking at over the semester.

Reading and Composition: Magic and Modernity, or Enchantment after Enlightenment

English R1B

Section: 1
Instructor: Sulpizio, Catherine
Time: MWF 9-10
Location: DWIN233

Book List

Huysmans: Là-Bas; Marlowe: Doctor Faustus

Description

“The absence of myth is also a myth: the coldest, the purest, the only true myth.”

In a moment when digital covens cast binding spells on Trump, viral Tik Tok investors combine crypto trading with astrology, and Pew Research claims there are 1.5 million self-identified pagans in America, is it fair to characterize modernity as “secular”? To address this question, this course will investigate the active if subterranean influence of the much maligned phenomenon known as the occult, gently amending Max Weber’s famous thesis of die Entzauberung der Welt —the “de-magic-ing” of the world. Tracing the spectral persistence of esoteric currents within the ascendant Enlightenment paradigm of rationality, we will discover illicit liaisons between science, technology, psychology, statecraft, alchemy, thaumaturgy, and erotic magic. Disturbing the concept of a secular modernity, the course will provide students with tools to develop a thesis for how the occult simultaneously mediates and defines the boundaries of religion and science. In addition to this, the course will consider how historically the occult provided certain procedures and techniques that sought to enable interventions in the surrounding world. Finally, as a class we will theorize ritual--its structure, its uses and abuses--in contemporary contexts.

Anchored by two literary works, Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus and Huysmans’ Là-Bas, our class will also encounter Renaissance grimoires, Rosicrucian manuscripts, alchemical texts, and a broad range of secondary materials, including excerpts from The Secret Life of Puppets, Techgnosis, and Technology as Magic. We will virtually detour through Princeton’s Engineering Anomalies Research Lab and University of Virginia’s Center for Perceptual Studies and gaze into the scrying mirror of digital art.

Reading and Composition: Bleak House

English R1B

Section: 2
Instructor: Cohan, Nathan
Time: MWF 10-11
Location: DWIN233

Book List

Dickens, Charles: Bleak House (978-0141439723)

Description

This course teaches reading, writing, and researching skills by applying them to one big book, Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, which was not always one big book. Originally published in 20 monthly installments from 1852 to 1853, Bleak House has always posed to its readers a problem of scale and appetite—so we will also practice sustained attention to the “serial” as a form replicated in Bleak House’s radio and television adaptations. Students will practice formal analysis of those media and will enter the ongoing critical conversation about Dickens’ satirical novel by reading and responding to other scholars, who have so far used the novel to analyze such Victorian fantasies as the gender of empire, ecological catastrophe, and spontaneous combustion, among a wide array of others.

Students will write, peer-review, and rewrite a series of literary-critical essays, with the goal of fostering attentive reading and viewing, imaginative analysis, and bold writing. As this course fulfills the R1B requirement, we will focus on scaling progressively longer essays and understanding and responding to secondary scholarly sources.

Reading and Composition: Working Class Chicanx Literature

English R1B

Section: 3
Instructor: Bircea, Jason
Time: MWF 10-11
Location: DWIN279

Book List

Rivera, Tomás : And the Earth Did Not Devour Him; Viramontes, Helena: Under the Feet of Jesus

Description

In this course, we’ll read some classic as well as more contemporary works of chicano/a/x literature focusing specifically on the lives and labors of agricultural, industrial and domestic workers. How are these different kinds of laboring–the work of the field, the factory and the home–represented in chicanx fiction, poetry, drama and film? And how might representing or providing an account of such laboring serve potentially emancipatory ends? Additional topics include immigration and migration; gendered labor; efforts for and against assimilation; political organization and resistance; and the artist’s relationship to their community.

Throughout this R1B course, you'll be cultivating your own reading and writing skills through class discussion, writing exercises, workshops and writing seminars. You’ll be asked not only to write about the material we read and discuss in class, but more importantly, to approach your own writing as something worth tending to.

Reading and Composition: The Love Story

English R1B

Section: 4
Instructor: Choi, 최 Lindsay || Lindsay Chloe
Time: MWF 11-12
Location: DWIN263

Book List

Recommended: Barthes, Roland: A Lover's Discourse

Description

What does it mean, in Taylor Swift's 2008 hit single “Love Story,” when the besotted speaker declares, “It's a love story, baby, just say, 'Yes'” -- and what, in this declaration, is the difference between the love story and love itself?

Along these lines of inquiry, this course will teach critical reading and writing skills through the "love story" as a literary genre and as a narrative mode which attempts to describe a particular social relationship. In our investigation of the love story, we will learn to analyze the relationship between genre and our experience of the world, and more broadly, to interrogate the work of literature in mediating reality. Our readings will draw from a variety of forms and media, including poetry, letters, short stories, and, potentially, reality television. We will also engage in critical conversations after reading some literary criticism and cultural theory, including Roland Barthes's A Lover's Discourse. Among others to be determined, texts for this course will include sonnets from Petrarch and Shakespeare, selected love letters from Franz Kafka to his translator, Milena Jesenská, and excerpts from Madame de Lafayette's The Princess of Cleves. Some further questions we might consider include: Can "the love story" be historicized? How can language be used to narrate a romance? What makes for a "good" love story? Why do we care to hear about other people's love stories?

The aim of this course will be to exercise our skills in reading and writing on literary texts, and to think critically about our analytic methods, as well as how, why, and to what end we might believe that they work. Students will write, peer-review, and rewrite a series of literary-critical essays, with the goal of fostering attentive reading and viewing, imaginative analysis, and bold writing. As this course fulfills the R1B requirement, we will focus on scaling progressively longer essays and incorporating research.

Reading and Composition: Thinking with Literature, Art, and Film

English R1B

Section: 5
Instructor: Ostas, Magdalena
Time: MWF 11-12
Location: Wheeler 122

Description

Do poems take up truths? Can a novel be a way of thinking about something? What can you learn—about yourself, about others, about the world—from a film? This course considers the ways that literature, art, and film are not only a part of our creative imaginations but also central sources of insight into what is real and actual. How do fictional and imaginative works touch what is worldbound? How do they help us see, hear, and understand our world?

All of the course readings will help us think about central philosophical questions—Who are we? How should we live? What do we know?—in compelling ways. We will read broadly across genres and forms. Texts will include poetry (William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop), fiction (Jane Austen, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf), drama (Henrik Ibsen, Samuel Beckett), film (Alfred Hitchcock, Agnès Varda), and cultural theory and philosophy (Plato, Nietzsche, Roland Barthes, Toni Morrison).

As a course in the Reading and Composition sequence, this class will focus on developing your skills in critical thinking and clear, graceful, persuasive written expression in the form of the academic essay. We will practice writing and reflect on writing regularly and frequently. Students will write two formal papers, each with revisions, and a final research paper. Other requirements include attendance, engaged and active class participation, and informal writing assignments. All are welcome.

Reading and Composition: Staging Desire: Sex and Sexuality in Renaissance Drama

English R1B

Section: 6
Instructor: Scott, Mark JR
Time: MWF 12-1
Location: EVAN41

Description

Book List:

Ford, John: ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore; Marlowe, Christopher: Edward II; Shakespeare, William: As You Like It.

Other Readings and Media:

Edward II (film), dir. Derek Jarman (1991)

Paris is Burning (film), dir. Jennie Livingston (1990).

Additional primary and secondary texts will be provided electronically, including works from Renaissance antitheatricalists like Philip Stubbes and Stephen Gosson, as well as modern theorists of gender and sexuality such as Michel Foucault and Judith Butler.

Description:

The drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries offers a fascinating site for the analysis of gender and sexuality as historical and theoretical constructs, rather than as the timeless and universal ‘facts’ of human experience which they are often assumed to be. In a ‘transvestite theatre’ in which all roles, male and female, are played by boys and men, assumptions regarding the absolute and fixed nature of gender difference are called into question, while the fact that scenes of heterosexual desire are played out between men creates a space for the expression of homosexual and other transgressive desires. At the level of both form and content, the early modern theatre above all underlines the status of gender as performance. We will read a set of plays produced between the 1580s and 1630s which pose gender and sexuality as central problems, studying these in conjunction with a variety of both Renaissance and modern-day texts confronting these debates. We will seek to reflect upon the immense shaping power of the societal norms which govern sex and gender, and to locate those instances where non-normative identities and sexualities assert themselves.

The broader academic purpose of this course is to develop your critical reading and writing skills, whatever your major might be. You will write and revise three papers of increasing length over the semester, and work with peers to improve your writing and critical thinking

Reading and Composition: A History of Monsters

English R1B

Section: 7
Instructor: Gable, Nickolas
Time: MWF 12-1
Location: DWIN233

Book List

Heaney, Seamus (translator): Beowulf; Kafka, Franz: The Metamorphosis; Stevenson, Robert Louis: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Description

Undead hordes, bloodthirsty beasts, and uncanny human hybrids are nothing new to the human imagination. The literature and folklore of most (if not all) human cultures is full of tales that bring our imagined fears to life.

In this course, our readings will focus on depictions of many creatures that have been described as “monstrous,” some from media over four thousand years old and others as recent as last year. Our research will look to the ancient and the modern, with a focus on both the mythology and folklore that inspired modern monsters and contemporary criticism of monsters as figures of radical change and fearful stasis. Covering traditions from cultures indigenous to Asia, Europe, and North America, we will track how different monsters have evolved over time and space and how the definition of “monstrous” has been adapted for each age and place. We will confront that which is uncomfortable, strange, and humorous along the way, using our explorations to try to understand the literary fascination with these monstrous creations.

Our main goal in this class is to become better readers, writers, and researchers. To do this, we will develop the skill of “close reading” to better understand and analyze our subject matter. We will “close read” all the media we encounter in this class—even visual media such as comics and films—by paying close attention to detail, which will help us to improve our own writing by making it as clear, concise, and evidence-driven as possible.

Your work in this class will culminate in a research project that will be supported by other assignments across the semester. You will be tasked with analyzing a monstrous figure or genre from a chosen cultural, historical, or literary tradition in an argumentative essay bolstered by independent research.

Reading and Composition: Writing the American City: From Redlining to Climate Change

English R1B

Section: 8
Instructor: Beckett, Balthazar I.
Time: MWF 12-1
Location: SOCS180

Description

The American city is an incredibly complex and dynamic organism—and the subject of a great body of literature—both fiction and non-fiction. This course will trace and critically engage how American urban development has been written about from the early twentieth century to today. We will follow how writers have addressed the dramatic changes that American urban spaces underwent from the progressive era, turn-of-the-century segregation and the experience of the Great Migration to redlining, white flight, and suburbanization in the wake of the New Deal. Studying metropolitan areas across the nation, from New York City to the Bay Area and from Chicago to New Orleans, this course asks students to write critically about urban development from the battles over “urban renewal” and the anti-eviction campaigns of the Civil Rights era to the impact of 1970s neoliberal policies, the “war on drugs” and militarized “broken windows” policing, and the urban uprisings of the early 1990s. We will end this semester by studying how writers address the impact that hyper-gentrification and climate chaos (from disaster capitalism to grassroots organizing) have on American cities today.

Building on the skills students acquired in R1A, this course will continue to develop reading, writing, and research skills with the aim to practice writing longer essays that are rhetorically aware and partake in relevant scholarly conversations. Over the course of this semester, students will submit two shorter essays, before concluding the course by submitting a research paper in which they will partake in a scholarly debate that they feel passionate about.

Course readings:

· Marshall, Paule. Brown Girl, Brownstones. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2009 [1959]. ISBN-13: 978-0486468327.

· Yates, Richard. Revolutionary Road. New York: Vintage, 2000 [1961]. · Eggers, Dave. Zeitoun. New York: Vintage (Random House), 2010. ISBN-13: 978-0307387943.

· Lethem, Jonathan. The Fortress of Solitude. New York: Vintage, 2004 [2003]. ISBN-13: 978-0375724886.

· Mengestu, Dinaw. The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears. New York: Riverhead, 2008 [2007]. ISBN-13:‎ 978-1594482854.

Selections from other fictional and non-fictional texts will be made available online. These will include texts by James Baldwin, Toni Cade Bambara, Marshall Berman, Mike Davis, Ashley Dawson, Amitav Ghosh, Jane Jacobs, Naomi Klein, Jonathan Lethem, Dawn Bohulano Mabalon, Jodi Melamed, Peter Moskowitz, Suleiman Osman, Nathaniel Rich, Richard Rothstein, Roy Scranton, Nayan Shah, Anna Deavere Smith, Rebecca Solnit, John Edgar Wideman, and Craig Wilder. Films include Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing and Joe Talbot’s The Last Black Man in San Francisco.

Reading and Composition: Thinking through Memory in Poetry and Fiction

English R1B

Section: 9
Instructor: Swensen, Dana
Time: MWF 1-2
Location: DWIN233

Book List

Carson , Anne: Nox ; Gaiman , Neil : The Ocean at the End of the Lane ; Ishiguro, Kazuo : When We Were Orphans; Shakespeare, William : Sonnets ; Yamashita, Karen Tei: Letters to Memory

Description

How and why do we remember? What does 'memory' mean to both an individual and a culture? How do fictional narrators construct their memorial landscapes? In this class we will explore the topic of memory as it appears in a wide variety of genres and styles from the 16th through the 21st century. We will consider memory as an expansive and rich literary territory. In doing so we will move from the science fiction of Ursula LeGuin to the sonnets of Thomas Wyatt and Shakespeare to the photographic diaries of Bernadette Mayer; from the visual memories of Anne Carson's Nox to the unreliable memories of Kazuo Ishiguro's narrators.

This course will involve the writing of essays along with regular peer review exercises. In addition to this, two creative-writing assignments will be pursued throughout the weeks of the session which will bind the process of reading about memory to that of writing about it. Throughout, the emphasis will be on honing our analytic skills in writing through processes of revision. As a fulfillment of the R1B component, we will focus on writing progressively longer essays and incorporating digital and bibliographic research techniques into our work.

Reading and Composition: Writing Politics

English R1B

Section: 10
Instructor: Wang, Jacob
Time: MWF 1-2
Location: Wheeler 122

Description

When we think of politics, we probably picture politicians debating, people organizing, or some sort of voting process. But are there other ways of “doing” politics, other appropriate verbs? This course will think about how we can associate the verb (or noun) “writing” with political processes and actions. What is the relationship between writing/language and politics? What does writing do with regards to politics – represent, critique, persuade, legislate, inform, demand, inspire? Are there certain genres of writing more amenable to politics than others? Does it matter if politicians are good writers? I hope thinking about the relationship between writing and politics will allow us to investigate these categories that seem important in our lives but that we might take for granted and therefore not give a lot of thought to. By reflecting on what it means to be political and on what writing does in the world, we will aim to arrive at broader understandings of both types of activities with the ultimate goal of becoming more empowered writers.

The thinking we do in this course will take place in discussions and conversations in class, but it will also take place in writing that you do, both in and out of class. You will use writing to understand, analyze, and engage with the texts we read, and to come up with ideas in response to the course’s questions and theme. Our goal is to become writers who can: accurately write about other texts, communicate effectively with readers, and offer valuable ideas and insights. We will achieve this goal by completing a series of shorter assignments that develop specific writing skills. The series of shorter assignments will culminate in essays that you will write for this course.

Reading and Composition: Nature Writing in English Literature

English R1B

Section: 11
Instructor: Tomasula y Garcia, Alba
Time: MWF 2-3
Location: DWIN233

Book List

Robert Finch & John Elder, eds.: The Norton Book of Nature Writing, College Edition

Description

The perceived divide between humans and the natural world has been defined as one of the most important frameworks under which our thoughts and behaviors are constructed. This has unquestionably been the case in the English-speaking world, whose landscapes and all they contain, for at least the past two hundred years, have been primarily framed and utilized as raw resources for human enterprises. Yet English literature—from its earliest examples to today’s offerings—is filled with a rich diversity of depictions of the natural world and human-nature interactions. From romantic prose on the Eden-like existence of “pure” environments to sober reflections on a desert’s amoral dangers, English literature has witnessed not only wildly manifold and changing landscapes, but a wildly diverse body of writings on nature. In this course, we will examine but a few of the ways in which relationships between humans and nature are represented in English literature; what histories, perceptions, and biases inform such representations; and what the real-world consequences of particular representations may be. We will gain a sense of how writing can influence feelings about nature, open up a space to interrogate ingrained assumptions about nature, and even shape major political decisions regarding the natural world. A few broad questions we will consider during this class include: What precisely is nature? How have particular English-speaking cultures (or even particular individuals) opposed or embraced it, and why? And how have certain human identities and behaviors been elevated “above” nature, stigmatized as “unnatural,” or even denigrated because of their supposed closeness to nature?

With the goal of developing your writing and research skills, we will primarily devote class time to discussing the course reading, with the goal of fostering critical thinking through a combination of lecture material, question and answer, and group discussion. We will also spend time preparing for papers by building writing, editing, and research skills.

Reading and Composition: Writing the American City: From Redlining to Climate Change

English R1B

Section: 12
Instructor: Beckett, Balthazar I.
Time: MWF 2-3
Location: Wheeler 122

Description

Course readings:

· Marshall, Paule. Brown Girl, Brownstones. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2009 [1959]. ISBN-13: 978-0486468327.

· Yates, Richard. Revolutionary Road. New York: Vintage, 2000 [1961]. · Eggers, Dave. Zeitoun. New York: Vintage (Random House), 2010. ISBN-13: 978-0307387943.

· Lethem, Jonathan. The Fortress of Solitude. New York: Vintage, 2004 [2003]. ISBN-13: 978-0375724886.

· Mengestu, Dinaw. The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears. New York: Riverhead, 2008 [2007]. ISBN-13:‎ 978-1594482854.

Reading and Composition: Practical Criticism

English R1B

Section: 13
Instructor: Ritland, Laura
Time: MWF 3-4
Location: Wheeler 122

Book List

Sharif, Solmaz: Look; Woolf, Virginia: To the Lighthouse

Description

What is “criticism”? We wouldn’t be wrong to associate this word with disgruntled critics, snobs, and fault-finders looking for ways to put others down. As Raymond Williams notes, “criticism” comes from the Greek kritikos—“a judge.” “Criticism” also names the general process of interpreting, analyzing, and writing about art and literature. Historically, this aesthetic version of criticism has been associated with elitist taste-making and the valuation of some arts as “high art” and others as “low art.” However, for centuries, people have been finding ways to practice and reinvent “criticism” in ways that orient it towards social equity and democracy, as well as forge its relevance anew to life’s day-to-day joys and trials. In this course, we will take on this vibrant and ongoing project—what we might call the search for a “practical criticism.” We will explore, test, and reimagine ways of engaging with literary and other comparative media to answer the following question: how can criticism be useful as equipment for living? What is a “practical criticism” for today?

The course will take us through some of the major historical schools of thought and techniques of (mostly) Anglophone criticism over the past century—for example, New Criticism, “close reading,” structuralism, post-structuralism, Marxist criticism, and cultural studies. We will trace some of the underlying connections and contrasts between these movements, particularly their philosophical and political attitudes. All the while, we will be thinking about these different criticisms in relation to contemporary politics and culture, as well as contemporary and emergent genres of criticism like the YouTube video essay, the personal essay, and the book review. Though our primary focus will be on literary texts (poems, novels, plays), we will also consider visual art, film, television, advertising, and social media as key objects of criticism. Assignments will involve producing your own unique pieces of criticism, culminating in a longer research essay on a literary or art piece of your choosing.

Reading and Composition: A Childhood

English R1B

Section: 14
Instructor: Yniguez, Rudi
Time: TTh 8-9:30
Location: Wheeler 122

Description

This course will focus on canonical British texts that claim either to represent for a child or to represent to a child. As we track these texts’ supposed invention of a certain kind of British childhood—and with it a certain kind of British identity—we’ll grapple with some of the binaries many of them reinforce or defy: child/adult, center/periphery, home/abroad, inside/outside, belonging/alienation, character/narrator, fantasy/reality. In doing so, we will investigate the impact of the child-figure on British figurations of gender, political representation, and empire. We’ll analyze the development of a traditionalized and somewhat stable concept of “childhood” as a universalizing experience/signifier while emphasizing the singularity of the child in fiction and the isolation of each ‘childhood’ within its own social world and text. How do literary adults and children relate to one another? What lines are drawn to first separate and then connect them? How can one represent—let alone enter into—the experiential space of another? What, exactly, does re-presenting come to mean under these circumstances?

Texts will include: Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, Winnie-the-Pooh, Wind in the Willows, and excerpts from Olaudah Equiano, Lyrical Ballads, Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, David Copperfield, Mill on the Floss, and To the Lighthouse. Other potentials include texts by E. Nesbit, Tove Ditlevsen, Elena Ferrante, Roald Dahl, Rudyard Kipling, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Many of these texts will be compiled into a course handbook (forthcoming)--and required editions for full texts will soon be found on CalCentral.

Reading and Composition: Writing with Beowulf

English R1B

Section: 15
Instructor: Stevenson, Max
Time: TTh 5-6:30
Location: 47 Evans

Book List

Donoghue, Daniel: Beowulf: A Verse Translation (Norton Critical Editions); Gardner, John: Grendel; Headley, Maria Dahvana: The Mere Wife; Rankine, Claudia: Citizen: An American Lyric

Description

This is not a class about Beowulf. As a course in the university’s R&C program, this is primarily a class on writing; as an R1B, it’s also a class on the skills of careful research and forceful argument.

It is, though, a class that uses Beowulf, one of the earliest literary texts in English, to explore what it means to be a writer in 2022. What does “authorship” mean when discussing an anonymous text, or when putting your own voice as a writer in conversation with other scholars? What does it mean to translate and adapt a work from one language or medium to another, or to write in different genres for different audiences using different registers? What does a poem about a single hero in sixth century Scandinavia have to say to a twenty-first century poem on systemic racism in the United States? How can we speak to and learn from people very unlike ourselves, and from writing very unlike our own? And just what do blood feuds have to do with bibliographies?

We’ll read both the original poem (in several translations) and read (and watch) a range of its adaptations, not only paying close attention to the poem’s form and its treatment of violence, gender, law, monstrosity, and history, but also considering how paying that kind of close attention to writing of any kind can make us not only better readers, but better writers ourselves.

Reading and Composition: Out of Obscurity

English R1B

Section: 16
Instructor: Davidson, William
Time: MWF 3-4
Location: DWIN233

Description

During this course we will read together, and write about, artists of all kinds who lived the majority of their life in obscurity--from familiar literary figures like Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Lorine Niedecker, to the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint and folk singer-songwriter Sixto Rodriguez, among a host of others. We will ask questions about reception and audience, about non-affiliated and outsider art that receives public recognition only belatedly.

In the process, and one that might shed some reflective light on the hyper-visible publicity pertinent to much contemporary popular and social media, we will think about the ways in which significant bodies of work that remained obscure, as a result of the arist's idiosyncracies or the prejudice of institutions, can help us understand the flaws of canonicity and the historically contingent formation of our own reading practices.

Reading and Composition: Thinking with Literature, Art, and Film

English R1B

Section: 17
Instructor: Ostas, Magdalena
Time: MWF 9-10
Location: Evans 61

Description

Reading and Composition: Frankentext: Reproduction and Literature

English R1B

Section: 18
Instructor: Zodrow, Kristin
Time: MWF 4-5
Location: 214 Haviland

Description

Reproduction (literally, “bringing into existence again”) can refer to making copies of works of art or the creation of offspring. The focus of this class will be Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein and its adaptations in the 20^th and 21^st centuries. In addition to analyzing selected literary and cinematic rehearsals of Frankenstein, we will consult historical sources, literary/art criticism, and contemporary theories of labor, gender, and biological life not only to situate this novel’s interest in life and art within its Romantic-era milieu but also to ask about the novel's endurance and transmutation as a text.

As an R1B, a major focus of this class will be the development of research and writing skills. The class will guide you in the creation of your own academic texts through assignments focused on selecting and citing sources, drafting, and revision.

Reading and Composition: Writing the American City: From Redlining to Climate Change

English R1B

Section: 19
Instructor: Beckett, Balthazar I.
Time: MWF 4-5
Location: Evans 72

Description

Course readings:

· Marshall, Paule. Brown Girl, Brownstones. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2009 [1959]. ISBN-13: 978-0486468327.

· Yates, Richard. Revolutionary Road. New York: Vintage, 2000 [1961]. · Eggers, Dave. Zeitoun. New York: Vintage (Random House), 2010. ISBN-13: 978-0307387943.

· Lethem, Jonathan. The Fortress of Solitude. New York: Vintage, 2004 [2003]. ISBN-13: 978-0375724886.

· Mengestu, Dinaw. The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears. New York: Riverhead, 2008 [2007]. ISBN-13:‎ 978-1594482854.

Reading and Composition: Silence

English R1B

Section: 22
Instructor: D'Silva, Eliot
Time: TuTh 8-9:30
Location: Dwinelle 263

Description

We are all silent at times. We keep quiet over dinner with our relatives or nod passively at work. Some people dislike silence, equating it with being alone and lonely, while others look forward to spending time with their thoughts, seeking out silence as a refuge from a chaotic, noisy world. In this class, we’ll think about how our personal, social, and political lives are shaped by silence and then read a few literary texts about silence. Silence has often been understood as a home for the creative mind and the writers on our syllabus all employ silence both as a literary technique and as a major theme in their work. We’ll read texts that engage silence not only as the absence of language but as a product of power relations and a response to the unknown, ineffable, aporetic aspects of existence. The class will also put these texts in dialogue with reflections on silence in queer theory, black studies and disability studies.

The class will provide opportunities for students to pose analytical questions, construct arguments supported by evidence and undertake scholarly research. Over the semester, students will complete assignments including annotated bibliographies, independent and collaborative close analysis, library visits, and a research paper on one of our texts. There might also be opportunities to respond to creative prompts that build on the key terms and concepts of the course, such as keeping a meditation journal.

Readings and screenings will include works by Samuel Beckett, John Cage, Toshio Mori, Toni Morrison and Kelly Reichardt.

Reading and Composition

English R1B

Section: 23
Instructor: No instructor assigned yet.
Time:
Location:

Reading and Composition: Science Fiction

English R1B

Section: 24
Instructor: Delehanty, Patrick
Time: TuTh 6:30-8
Location: Dwinelle 254

Book List

Dick, Philip K.: Ubik; Ellison et al.: Dangerous Visions; Gibson, William: Neuromancer; Johnson, Denis: Fiskadoro; Le Guin, Ursula K. : The Dispossessed; Lem, Stanislaw: Solaris; Miller, Walter J. : A Canticle for Leibowitz; Strugatsky, Boris & Arkady: Roadside Picnic

Description

“We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is.” -Stanislaw Lem, Solaris.

Science fiction, or speculative fiction as it's sometimes called, has often been referred to as a literature of ideas. This designation has both accentuated its philosophical character and set it apart from "real" literature. In this course, we will examine both aspects, and we will see how our texts, by imagining different futures, alien encounters, radical technologies, the apocalypse, utopias and dystopias, and any number of different worlds and fantastic situations, imagine not only what the future may hold, but also hold up a mirror to the present.

Rather than looking at the whole history of the genre, this course is primarily centered around texts from the 1960s through the 1980s, often referred to as "new wave" sci-fi. This period saw a transition away from the sci-fi of the first half of the 20th century, which primarily appeared in pulp magazines and was often aimed at children and young adults, to a new, more mature, ambitious, and daring literary sensibility. We will also be looking at some films and television shows, including some written by the authors we will be reading. Possible topics include utopia/dystopia, the interaction between humans and technology, cyclical history and religion, alien encounters, post-humanism, and political imaginaries.

In addition to cultivating your critical thinking and literary analysis skills, this course will help to strengthen your academic and analytic writing. Becoming a better writer requires practice; as such, you will be required to write several essays of increasing length as the semester progresses, as well as revising your writing heavily. We will also work on improving your writing through shorter assignments such as reflections, responses, and revisions. Moreover, since this course is R1B, we will focus on conducting original research, including finding sources and coming up with an original research topic. The class will culminate in a research paper on a topic of your choice.

Reading and Composition: Factual Fictions of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

English R1B

Section: 25
Instructor: Struhl, Abigail
Time: TuTh 6:30-8
Location: Dwinelle 250

Book List

Equiano, Olaudah: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; Melville, Herman: Benito Cereno; NourbeSe Philip, M.: Zong!

Description

Fake News! Alternative Facts! In recent years, our political discourse has been polarized, each side accusing the other of fudging the facts. But just what is a fact? And what if the opposite of fact isn’t understood as lying, but rather as fiction? This course will examine transatlantic case studies from and about the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries--the period in which fiction came to be recognized and celebrated as a creative resource, rather than denigrated as mere deception. Accounts of the Atlantic slave trade will be of particular interest for thinking through the question of what fiction can do to challenge and subvert accepted “facts” about who deserves to have authority in a radically unequal society.

Questions of genre and authority will also be at the forefront of discussions of our own academic writing as we work toward the writing of a research essay. What are the conventions of academic writing and research? How is this “factual” form of writing distinguished from other genres? What are the linguistic and conceptual markers of facticity? Is there any place for generic experimentation in the writing of an academic paper? And finally, what does it mean to write with authority in the college classroom, and, more generally, in today’s socially and politically polarized landscape?

Freshman Seminar: Song

English 24

Section: 2
Instructor: Turner, James Grantham
Time: W 2-3 pm
Location: Dwinelle 189

Description

Literature and music are too often separated. The old epic poem begins “I sing” – but the poet doesn’t mean it literally. Performers sometimes concentrate on producing a beautiful or powerful sound, rather than making the words audible. We praise writing that is lyrical or song-like, but sing-song denotes something banal and mechanical. Ezra Pound valued “a sort of poetry where music, sheer melody, seems as if it were just bursting into speech.” Poetry, as shown here by the great Renaissance artist Raphael, holds a book in one hand and a musical instrument in the other, a lyre (as in lyrical): together they lift her up to a higher form of inspiration, which is why she grows wings. In this seminar we will try to do the same, to study actual songs both as literature and as music. We will ask: what is song-like about poetry and what is poetic about music? What happens, emotionally, when text and music blend together? What does it feel like to perform songs, in the concert-hall or in the shower?

We will study just six samples or small song-clusters, from a 500-year period. Each unit will be given two classes, over two weeks. First we will discuss the plain text, as poetry, and only at the end of the hour hear the song itself, in a recording or performance video that you can then play over and over in your spare time. For the following week we will be joined by the distinguished soprano and conductor Christine Brandes, to enrich our discussion with all the insights of the musician and singer. We will read and hear songs from Shakespeare’s plays and a setting of Milton’s “most musical” poetry, expressions of passion, grief and calm written by a female and a male composer, a Lutheran hymn transformed by Baroque splendor, dreamy Impressionist eroticism, and a soulful jazz “standard.”

We will set aside the final three weeks for students to present a song of their own choosing - which is the only formal assignment. There is no book to purchase, because all materials will be downloadable as text (English, German, Italian and French, with translations) and as links to recordings and video clips. No previous musical expertise is required; come with an open ear and a song in your heart.

Introduction to the Study of Poetry

English 26

Section: 1
Instructor: Bernes, Jasper
Time: TuTh 2-3:30
Location: Wheeler 24

Book List

Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry: Volume 1; Eisen-Martin, Tongo : Blood on the Fog ; Wordsworth, William and Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: Lyrical Ballads

Description

What is a poem? What is poetry? What powers of language are particular to poems and poetry? In this course, we will explore various answers to these difficult if not unanswerable questions while acquainting ourselves with some of the forms poetry has taken in English over the last five hundred years: sonnets and ballads, odes and riddles, monologues and epistles.

In examining the breadth and diversity of poetry written in English, we will also consider the historical transformation of poetry, with particular emphasis on the ways that poets from the nineteenth century forward have responded to modernity and its displacements.

Literature of American Cultures: The Wild, Wild West-- California and the Politics of Possibility

English 31AC

Section: 1
Instructor: Saha, Poulomi
Time: TuTh 2-3:30
Location: Physics Building 3

Description

The Golden State – fast fame, endless sunshine, and gold in the ground. California has long occupied an iconic place in the American and global imagination as the land of limitless opportunity, utopian pinnacle of the promise getting ahead, making it big, and living large. This course takes up the question California as a site of political possibility. We will take up the fraught relationship between dreams of economic prosperity and neocolonial violence that underpin a popular cultural fascination with the state and the idea of the “wild west” more generally. From Spanish missions and Anglo settler colonialism to the Gold Rush and Chinese Exclusion, we will begin with the conflicted origins of racial diversity, before moving on to a variety of political formations that emerged in the 20^th century: Free Love counterculture, the IOAT occupation of Alcatraz, the Free Speech Movement, the development of Ethnic Studies, agricultural workers movements, anti-immigrant violence, Reaganism, and other radical imaginations.

This course, which satisfies the American Cultures requirement, engages a range of historical, sociological, and theoretical material to understand how ethnic and racial categories have been formed and produced in America. Students will develop a critical vocabulary for race, gender, and class in contemporary America and an understanding of their historical antecedents. This course will require you to demonstrate skill in researching, planning and writing papers, incorporating an analytical understanding of key concepts in the course, and the capacity to engage scholarly debates in the field of Ethnic American literature.

Introduction to the Writing of Short Fiction

English 43A

Section: 1
Instructor: Abrams, Melanie
Time: MW 9:30-11
Location: Wheeler 300

Description

The aim of this course is to introduce students to the study of short fiction—to explore the elements that make up the genre, and to enable students to talk critically about short stories and begin to feel comfortable and confident with their own writing of them. Students will write two short stories, along with various exercises, and critiques of their peers' work. The course will be organized as a workshop. All student stories will be edited and critiqued by the instructor and by other students in the class. This class focuses on psychological realism, so genre fiction (sci fi, fantasy, fan fic, etc.) will not be workshopped.

All readings will be available online.

Introduction to the Writing of Verse

English 43B

Section: 1
Instructor: Nathan, Jesse
Time: TuTh 8-9:30
Location: 305 Wheeler

Description

This is an introductory creative writing workshop in which participants write, revise, and discuss their original works of poetry in a collaborative group setting. We'll rely on a series of writing prompts, technical exercises, and a wide-ranging survey of poetry from this and past centuries. Our aim is to learn something about how to think about the practice and art of writing verse, how to begin poems, how to develop them, how to end them, how to revise, how to think about representation and responsibility, and generally how to find one's way to the words.

Literature in English: Through Milton

English 45A

Section: 1
Instructor: Nolan, Maura
Time: MW 1-2
Location: Cory 277

Description

What is the English literary tradition? Where did it come from? What are its distinctive habits, questions, styles, obsessions? This course will answer these and other questions by focusing on five key writers from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: the anonymous Beowulf poet; Geoffrey Chaucer; Christopher Marlowe; John Donne; and John MIlton. We will start with the idea that the English literary tradition is a set of interrelated texts and problems that recur over the course of several centuries. Some of these relationships are formal; we will pay special attention to the genres, techniques, and styles that poets use to create their works. Some of these relationships are linguistic; students will learn to read Middle English (out loud, too!) and explore the significance of linguistic change as the Middle Ages becomes the Renaissance. Other relationships are historical; we will explore not only the pressure of contemporary events on literature, but also literature's role in creating both historical continuity and change over time. And some of these relationships are cultural, as poets reflect upon, seek to change, furiously criticize, or happily embrace a variety of human behaviors, from religious practices to love relationships to debates about gender to death and dying.

Throughout the semester, students will work on developing their skill at close reading. We will work on close reading during lectures and in your discussion sections. You will do close readings at home. You are welcome to come to office hours to practice close reading! No one can be a literary critic who cannot perform a close reading of a literary text. We will work on learning the tools of the trade, the literary terms and generic distinctions necessary for close reading. Expect to write three papers and to take a final exam.

Literature in English: Late-17th through Mid-19th Centuries

English 45B

Section: 1
Instructor: Puckett, Kent
Time: TuTh 10-11
Location: Wheeler 315

Description

This course is an introduction to British and American literature from the eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth century. We'll read works from that period (by Swift, Franklin, Equiano, Wordsworth, Austen, Brontë, Melville, Eliot, Douglass, Dickinson, Poe, and others) and think about how politics, aesthetics, race, gender, identity, and the everyday find expression in a number of different literary forms. We'll especially consider the material and symbolic roles played by the idea and practice of revolution.

Literature in English: Mid-19th through the 20th Century

English 45C

Section: 1
Instructor: Gang, Joshua
Time: MW 2-3
Location: Social Sciences 20

Book List

Dickens, Charles: Hard Times; Faulkner, William: The Sound and the Fury; Johnson, James Weldon: Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; Tutuola, Amos: The Palm Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts; Woolf, Virginia: Mrs Dalloway

Description

This course will examine different examples of British, Irish, American, and global Anglophone literature from the middle of the 19th century through the middle of the 20th. Moving across a number of genres and movements, we will focus on the ways novelists, poets, and dramatists have used literary form to represent, question, and even produce different aspects of modernity (broadly construed). Particular attention will be paid to concepts such as realism, naturalism, expressionism, and modernism, and to literature’s broader engagements with ideas of race and immigration, gender and sexuality, colonialism and empire, diaspora, literacy, mythology, economics and labor, and technological advancement.

Readings will include fiction by Charles Dickens, Sui Sin Far/Edith Eaton, William Faulkner, James Weldon Johnson, James Joyce, Amos Tutuola, and Virginia Woolf; drama by Samuel Beckett, Adrienne Kennedy, Sophie Treadwell, and Luis Valdez; and poetry or essays by Matthew Arnold, WH Auden, Emily Dickinson, TS Eliot, Rodolfo Gonzalez, Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and Virginia Woolf.

Evaluation will be based on a combination of papers, examinations, and course participation.

Practices of Literary Study: Murderers, Madmen and Dissolutes: Cormac McCarthy and His Progeny

English 90

Section: 1
Instructor: Danner, Mark
Time: TuTh 12:30-2
Location: Wheeler 300

Description

The heroes of Cormac McCarthy's novels occupy the borderlands of the American imagination and court its darkest urges. He is a writer fascinated by violence and the sacred, by loneliness and worship, by the American jeremiad and the scream in the forest. The haunting rhythms of his prose echo Melville and Faulkner and the King James Version but the anguish of his protagonists in their battered landscapes evoke Dostoevsky and Kafka and Beckett. This fall the 88-year-old master will publish not one but two new novels. In this seminar we will read those new works and endeavor to set them against his large body of writing -- novels as well as films -- in an attempt to come to grips with McCarthy's six-decade foray into the furthest reaches of the American Gothic.

Practices of Literary Study: Reading and Writing about Science Fiction

English 90

Section: 2
Instructor: Snyder, Katherine
Time: MW 2-3:30
Location: Wheeler 301

Book List

Atwood, Margaret: Oryx and Crake; El Akkad, Omar: American War; Ishiguro, Kazuo: Never Let Me Go; Shteyngart, Gary: Super Sad True Love Story

Description

As a genre, science fiction has always pushed at the limits of the human—What makes us different from machines or animals? What is our place in the universe? What can the future tell us about the present day and the historical past? Yet science fiction has long been seen as a limiting case for literature, as a flimsy gadget unworthy of the serious literary critic whose methodologies are calibrated to more finely-grained texts. This view, however, reveals questionable assumptions about both science fiction and literature, and about what literary critics do when they read and write about them. In this class, we will put our own assumptions to the test, exploring various modes of textual interpretation and developing our analytical and argumentative skills. By attending closely to science fiction short stories and novels in a range of styles and modes, we will ask what makes for good reading and we will practice to become better writers.

Practices of Literary Study: Walt Whitman and the Idea of America

English 90

Section: 3
Instructor: Nathan, Jesse
Time: TuTh 9:30-11
Location: Wheeler 305

Description

Whitman worked on Leaves of Grass for forty years, over at least six editions. In this course we'll devote ourselves to reading Leaves of Grass, comparing versions as well as reading selections from his prose, such as his famous 1855 preface and various Civil War sketches, including those published in Specimen Days. To deepen our sense of Whitman's context, we'll also read short selections from some of his contemporaries: Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sojourner Truth, and Mark Twain. Our aim will be to understand what Whitman's styles, forms, methods, and principles have to say about the idea of America, and democracy in general. In a larger sense, we'll try to understand what was going on in American literature at the very moment that the generous, idealistic conception of America collided with the barbarism of the slave system that built it. Requirements include two four-page essays and one six-page essay, as well as regular attendance and participation in discussion.

Books: Whitman: Prose and Poetry (please find this exact edition: published by Library of America, ISBN 978-1-883011-35-2).

Other Media: Course reader selections handed out by instructor.

Practices of Literary Study: Seamus Heaney and the Twentieth Century

English 90

Section: 4
Instructor: Nathan, Jesse
Time: TuTh 2-3:30
Location: Wheeler 305

Description

In this course, we'll read the poetry of Seamus Heaney, from his early work to his last poems. We'll also take a look at some of his prose and translations. Our hope is to use the oeuvre of Seamus Heaney as a lens with which to view the history and politics of the twentieth century, particularly in the English-speaking world. We'll touch on the work of Heaney's contemporaries, writers and thinkers in the Anglophone world such as Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Derek Walcott, and we'll understand the poetry in terms of questions of form, lyric, colonialism, empire, translation, transatlantic culture, the natural world, childhood, and the connections--as well as vast differences--between rural life and the urban milieu in which many poets end up living and working. Requirements include two four-page essays and one six-page essay, as well as regular attendance and participation in discussion.

Book #1: OPENED GROUND - https://search.library.berkeley.edu/discovery/fulldisplay?docid=alma991007041099706532&context=L&vid=01UCS_BER:UCB&lang=en&search_scope=DN_and_CI&adaptor=Local%20Search%20Engine&tab=Default_UCLibrarySearch&query=any,contains,opened%20ground%20seamus%20heaney&offset=0

Book #2: SELECTED POEMS - https://search.library.berkeley.edu/discovery/fulldisplay?docid=cdi_askewsholts_vlebooks_9780571321735&context=PC&vid=01UCS_BER:UCB&lang=en&search_scope=DN_and_CI&adaptor=Primo%20Central&tab=Default_UCLibrarySearch&query=any,contains,selected%20poems%20of%20seamus%20heaney%202013&offset=0

Practices of Literary Study: Poetry and Revolution

English 90

Section: 5
Instructor: Bernes, Jasper
Time: TuTh 5-6:30
Location: Social Sciences 180

Book List

DiPrima, Diane: Revolutionary Letters; Eisen-Martin, Tongo: Blood on the Fog

Description

Why write a poem? What powers are specific to poetry? In this course, we will seek answers to these questions and others by examining the many varieties of poems written in English since the sixteenth century: sonnets and ballads, odes and riddles, monologues and epistles. Our broad survey will funnel into a discussion of poetry as a mode of symbolic and even revolutionary action, pursued through a reading of politically powerful “case study” poems by P.B. Shelley, Claude McKay, Amiri Baraka, Diane Di Prima, and Tongo Eisen-Martin.

The Seminar on Criticism: "Atlantic Haunts, Black Possession"

English 100

Section: 1
Instructor: Ellis, Nadia
Time: MW 5-6:30
Location: Wheeler 305

Book List

Brodber, Erna: Louisiana; Bronte, Charlotte: Jane Eyre; Carby, Hazel: Imperial Intimacies; Hartman, Saidiya: Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments; Morrison, Toni: Beloved; Morrison, Toni: Playing in the Dark; Rhys, Jean: Wide Sargasso Sea; Scott, Dennis: An Echo in the Bone

Description

An introduction to black diasporic criticism, this seminar uses various angles of approach toward the notion of the spirit, the haunt, and the possession in order to trace a tradition of black presence English literatures and cultures. We will study fiction, artifacts from the visual and anthropological archive, contemporary poetry, and examples from popular culture--a range of genres that represents the multi-modal techniques of black literary studies. Key interlocuters will include: Toni Morrison, Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, Roberto Strongman, Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley, and Hazel Carby. Assignments will be geared towards developing a working knowledge of important concepts, debates, and interventions in the field -- and will range from the brief and experimental to a substantial immersion in a key text.

The Seminar on Criticism: The African-American Essay

English 100

Section: 2
Instructor: Best, Stephen M.
Time: TuTh 3:30-5
Location: Wheeler 305

Book List

Als, Hilton: The Women; Baldwin, James: Collected Essays; Rankine, Claudia: Citizen: An American Lyric

Description

Readers of James Baldwin, W. E. B. DuBois, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, and other black writers have often turned to their essays with a goal of better understanding their literary work. In this course we will consider the African-American essay as a literary form in its own right, one that rewards close formal analysis. The essay (from Old French essai, “attempt”) is a sort of rhetorical trial balloon, implying firstness, a want of finish, and a rigorous nonsystematicity. We will consider the matter of incompletion in two respects -- the essay as it engages the topic of the incomplete project of black freedom, and the essay as ongoing experiment in form – with a goal of puzzling out how the two are related.

The Seminar on Criticism: Satire

English 100

Section: 3
Instructor: Blanton, C. D.
Time: MW 5-6:30
Location: Social Sciences 180

Description

Satire is a corrosive and uncomfortable mode, designed to lacerate, to excoriate, to deplore, scorn, and disdain. But it selects its objects carefully and measures them precisely. Satire does not usually undertake to represent the world accurately; but it does seek to represent its world truthfully.
   That difference between truth and accuracy will guide much of our exploration of this strange mode, of the attitudes that it makes possible and the cold world that requires such chilling attitudes. That world tends, historically speaking, to be a ‘society’ rather than a ‘community’, urban and urbane, with all the shallow anonymity and public posturing, even decadence, that such an ‘advanced’ or abstract social order enables and implies. Satire is a late form. Even its ancient origins are late ones, dating to the early decades and centuries of imperial Roman power, with its steady concentration of wealth and a cynically brutal avarice, after the collapse of classical republicanism. From the beginning, satire is both a critical and an oppositional mode.
   This course, then, is an examination of the logic of satire: both its social logic (the ways in which it strives to cast a larger social reality in a recognizable symbolic shape) and its formal logic (the ways in which it goes about securing the truthfulness of its representations). We will explore satire’s historical origins as a distinct figural mode and critical problem, scanning the gentler moral inflections of poets like Horace and Persius alongside the more contemptuous tones of writers like Juvenal and Petronius. But we will then spend more of our attention on the two eras in which satire flowered most powerfully and (sometimes) most poisonously in English letters, in London in particular.
   The first of these emerges (roughly) through the first half of the eighteenth century, with the work of (among others) John Dryden, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, John Gay, and Samuel Johnson. The second comprises the interwar decades of the twentieth and includes writers ranging from T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis, Mina Loy and W. H. Auden, to Henry Green and Evelyn Waugh.
   Throughout, we will be concerned with both the critical problem of satire and satire’s own practice of criticism.

The Seminar on Criticism: Styles of Austen and Wilde

English 100

Section: 4
Instructor: Eisenberg, Emma Charlotte
Time: TuTh 11-12:30
Location: Dwinelle 279

Book List

Austen, Jane: Emma; Austen, Jane: Lady Susan/The Watsons/Sanditon; Wilde, Oscar: De Profundis and Other Prison Writings; Wilde, Oscar: The Major Works

Description

Jane Austen and Oscar Wilde are nineteenth century style icons. Wilde was a celebrity in his own time and Austen has had avid fans, imitators, and adaptors for centuries. But what exactly are the styles of Austen and Wilde? What is style? Using Austen and Wilde as case studies, this seminar will ask students to engage in different methods and theories around style as a critical object. “Style” has been a productive literary term due to its application at multiple scales (individual, group, period, national styles) and in relation to different categories of value (moral, social, aesthetic). To study style is to already have defined it – but these definitions, and their ideological freight, can often be obscured. To uncover these implications, we will frame our primary texts with criticism that approaches Austen and Wilde's styles through classical rhetoric, nineteenth century reviews, sociology, and queer theory. In early assignments, students will practice their own “stylistics," which might include extrapolating descriptions of Austenian and/or Wildean style through close reading, as well as testing those accounts on the authors’ more unusual works and against other critics' descriptions (~10 pages of writing across a few short exercises). The class will culminate in a more formal 8-10 final essay that engages with other scholars.

The Seminar on Criticism: The Victorian Novel

English 100

Section: 5
Instructor: Banerjee, Sukanya
Time: TuTh 8-9:30
Location: Wheeler 301

Book List

Braddon, Mary E.: Aurora Floyd; Bronte, Charlotte: Jane Eyre; Dickens, Charles: Hard Times; Stoker, Bram: Dracula

Description

Focusing on the Victorian novel, this course will examine why it emerged as the dominant literary form in nineteenth-century Britain. What made the novel so popular, and in what ways did the novel shape—and was shaped in turn—by the prevailing social, political, and aesthetic preoccupations of the time? What accounts for the Victorian novel’s abiding hold on us today? In addressing these questions, we will read different genres of the Victorian novel, the bildungsroman, the “industrial” novel, the sensation novel, and the fin de siècle gothic. In doing so, we will also focus on enhancing our analytical skills: close reading, developing a thesis, and structuring an argument. Course assignments will include a couple of short assignments culminating in a final paper that will be due at the end of the semester. Readings include the novels listed above and materials in bCourses.

The Seminar on Criticism: Romance as Colonial History

English 100

Section: 8
Instructor: Childers, Joel
Time: MW 11-12:30
Location: Wheeler 301

Description

This course is a study in the history of romance as a mode, genre, and concept from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century, with an emphasis on the period to which romance eventually lent its name: Romanticism. We will attend closely to the formal and thematic characteristics of romance in its initial phases, including its origins as a form of vernacular storytelling, as well as the extent to which those characteristics are thought to shape innovative poetry and prose fiction of the early modern period and beyond. This course will also pay special attention to the political contexts in which romance develops and to which it imaginatively responds; we will ask what role romance plays in the formation of ideologies of empire, race, and religious otherness, both within Europe and between Europe and the Middle East. A major focus in this regard will be on histories of (settler) colonialism.

As a seminar in criticism, this course will also use romance to broadly trace developments in English literary criticism, from its origins as an institutional practice, to major developments in twentieth and twenty-first century theory, including genre theory, Marxism, New Historicism, queer theory, and post- and settler colonial theory.

Requirements for this course include leading class discussion and two essays (5-7 pp and 8-10 pp).

The following is a list of potential primary texts; note those with asterisks will be abridged:

Chrétien de Troyes, Lancelot: The Knight of the Cart

*Wace, Roman de Brut

Anon., Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

*Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso*

Torquato Tasso, Gerusalemme Liberata

Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote

Keats, selected poems

Percy Shelley, selected poems

Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

*Herman Melville, Mardi

Introduction to Old English

English 104

Section: 1
Instructor: Miller, Jennifer
Time: TuTh 2-3:30
Location: Wheeler 102

Description

This course is aimed at beginners, whether graduate* or undergraduate, familiarizing them with the principles and practice of linguistic decoding in relation to both medieval manuscripts and modern editions, as well as with the grammar and vocabulary of, primarily, Old English prose: historiographical (histories), hagiographical (saints’ lives) and homiletic (sermons). By the end of the semester, you will be competent, if not virtuosic, readers/interpreters of Old English prose, and know a decent amount about the culture that produced the books in which it survives.

*graduates, please contact me for enrollment information and a review of the requirements

The Bible as Literature

English 107

Section: 1
Instructor: Goldsmith, Steven
Time: TuTh 9:30-11
Location: Moffitt 101

Book List

New Oxford Annotated Bible, New Revised Standard Version (Fifth Edition); Alter, Robert: Genesis: Translation and Commentary; Browning, W.R.F.: Oxford Dictionary of the Bible

Description

In this class, we will read a selection of biblical texts as literature; that is, we will read them in many ways but not as divine revelation. We will take up traditional literary questions of form, style, and structure, but we will also learn how to ask historical, political, and theoretical questions of a text that is multi-authored, thoroughly fissured, and complexly sedimented in its historical layers. Among other topics, we will pay special attention to how authority is established and contested in biblical texts; how biblical authors negotiate the ancient Hebrew prohibition against representing God in images; and how the gospels are socially and historically poised between the original Jesus movement that is their source and the institutionalization of the church that follows. Assignments will include a midterm exam, a paper, and a final exam.

Chaucer

English 111

Section: 1
Instructor: Nolan, Maura
Time: MW 5-6:30
Location: Wheeler 212

Description

In the late fourteenth century, Geoffrey Chaucer created a fictional pilgrimage in which travelers competed with one another to tell a tale “of best sentence and moost solaas”—meaning, a tale that best combines moral seriousness with pleasure. The resulting collection of stories, the Canterbury Tales, will provide our text for this class. Chaucer experimented with a wide range of genres and styles in the Tales; you will encounter medieval romance, fabliau (a kind of bawdy comic story), saints' lives, beast fables, autobiographical prologues, and more. In the midst of this formal diversity, we find themes that tie the story collection together: the role of women in literature and the world; the nature and meaning of vernacular poetry; the psychology of religious experience; the effect of power on human relationships; the place of art in society; the nature of causality and human free will; and more. We will read the Canterbury Tales from start to finish, focusing on close reading in order to address these themes. You will work in groups as well as individually as you learn to read Middle English (no prior experience necessary). And we will read the Tales out loud as much as we can!

Please note that the text for this class, Jill Mann’s edition of the Canterbury Tales, published by Penguin, is also available as an e-book from Amazon. HOWEVER, when you look up the book on Amazon, the Kindle book linked to the Mann edition is NOT the actual ebook. You must search for “penguin canterbury tales kindle”; the edition then appears, and it costs approximately $15. If the ebook you are buying is free, or only a few dollars, it is NOT the edition you should buy. Feel free to email me if you are having trouble finding the proper ebook.

This class satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.

The English Renaissance (through the 16th Century)

English 115A

Section: 1
Instructor: Marno, David
Time: TuTh 5-6:30
Location: SSB 60

Book List

Greenblatt, Stephen: The Norton Anthology of English Literature, volume B: The Sixteenth and the Early Seventeenth Centuries

Description

In this course, we follow how English authors from Thomas More to John Donne participated in the grand cultural project of the Renaissance, defined by the belief that consuming and producing culture would elevate human beings above their natural state. Many of our authors supported the project; some opposed it fervently. But willingly or not, everyone we read during the semester contributed to it, if only by virtue of recording their thoughts and feelings, impressions and fancies in writing. Our aim in the course is to understand both the project of the Renaissance and the beliefs behind it by looking at the works of Francis Petrarch, Thomas Wyatt, Anne Locke, William Shakespeare, Mary Sidney, and John Donne, among others.

Text: Greenblatt, ed., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume B: The Sixteenth and the Early Seventeenth Century; additional readings will be available on BCourses.

Shakespeare: Tragedy

English 117B

Section: 1
Instructor: Puckett, Kent
Time: TuTh 12:30-2
Location: Wheeler 315

Description

“We seem,” writes A. C. Bradley in his Shakespearean Tragedy, “to have before us a type of the mystery of the whole world, the tragic fact which extends far beyond the limits of tragedy. Everywhere, from the crushed rocks beneath our feet to the soul of man, we see power, intelligence, life and glory, which astound us and seem to call for our worship. And everywhere we see them perishing, devouring one another and destroying themselves, often with dreadful pain, as though they came into being for no other end.” We’ll read and discuss many of Shakespeare’s tragedies—early, middle, and late—both to see how they work as aesthetic objects and to relate them to theories of and ideas about the nature of tragedy from Aristotle to Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Arendt, and others. We’ll want both to understand Shakespeare's sense of the tragic as a response to his time and to see how Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and other plays might help us to understand what remains true about the experience of the tragic in literature, history, and life.

Literature of the Restoration and the Early 18th Century

English 119

Section: 1
Instructor: Turner, James Grantham
Time: MW 11-12:30
Location: Wheeler 300

Description

The period from the “Restoration” of Charles II (1660) to the death of Alexander Pope (1744) produced the last poems of Milton, the first English pornography and feminist polemic, the most devastating satires ever written, influential novels like Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels, the most amusing comedies, and the most outrageous obscenity. London (already the largest city in the world) was shut down by a deadly plague, then burned to the ground – does this sound familiar? We will begin by reading and analyzing contemporary accounts of this catastrophe. Yet within a few generations London bounced back, for better or worse: this period invented great literature, architecture and music, the scientific revolution, insurance and paper money, but also the stock market and the colonial empire based on slavery. We will explore the contrasts and contradictions as well as the abundance and brilliance. Canonical figures like Hobbes, Dryden, Congreve, Pope and Swift will be juxtaposed to scandalous and/or marginal authors: women writers like Aphra Behn, Mary Astell and Mary Wortley Montagu, Puritan outlaws like John Bunyan, and renegade aristocrats like the Earl of Rochester. Dominant themes, always treated with devastating wit and skeptical realism, include sexuality and identity, the politics of gender as well as nation, and the representation of “other” cultures (Surinam, West Africa, Ireland, Ottoman Turkey, cannibals, giants, talking horses).

All our readings will be available to download.

This class satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.

American Literature: 1865-1900

English 130C

Section: 1
Instructor: Tamarkin, Elisa
Time: TuTh 3:30-5
Location: GSPP 150

Description

A survey of major works of U.S. literature after the Civil War, with special attention to artistic experimentation in these years and to the rise of "realism" in literature. The "Gilded Age" put unprecedented faith in ideals of progress and individualism, in economic expansion and big business. It also was marked by all the problems of Reconstruction, by racial injustice and the rise of Jim Crow laws, by deep poverty, and by unresolved debates about the role of the federal government in social welfare. Writers responded to this moment in a variety of surprising ways that also reflected on literature’s uncertain status as a medium of social protest or else as a separate realm outside the new social realities that were made visible to readers like never before. Our authors will include Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Stephen Crane, William Dean Howells, Charles Chesnutt, Mark Twain, Jacob Riis, Henry James, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Edith Wharton.

African American Literature and Culture: The Art of Black Diaspora

English 133T

Section: 1
Instructor: Ellis, Nadia
Time: MW 2-3
Location: Wheeler 102

Book List

Gyasi, Yaa: Homegoing; Hartman, Saidiya: Lose Your Mother; Hurston, Zora Neale: Their Eyes Were Watching God; McKay, Claude: Home to Harlem

Description

The black diaspora is, amongst other things, a literary tradition: a complex, cross-generic set of texts produced by black writers located in almost every nation across the globe, equal in complexity and variation to the modern concept of race that is inextricably tied to its formation. But how can one conceptual framework possibly contain such a dazzlingly various canon? In this class we’ll read novels, watch films, listen to music, and look at art to begin to answer that question. We'll read critics and thinkers to understand the history of black diaspora, the political implications of its formations, and the theories underwriting its vibrant and varied aesthetics. We will move through a broad sweep of the twentieth century and into the contemporary moment, and we'll cover a wide variety of contexts and genres. This variety and breadth is crucial to laying a foundation in the field and to opening up the issue of identity-across-difference that is fundamental in black diasporic culture.

Modes of Writing (Exposition, Fiction, Verse, etc.)

English 141

Section: 1
Instructor: Abrams, Melanie
Time: MW 12-1
Location: Mulford 159

Description

This course will introduce students to the study of creative writing—fiction and poetry. Students will learn to talk critically about these forms and begin to feel comfortable and confident writing within these genres. Students will write a variety of exercises and more formal pieces. In weekly discussion sections, students will participate in class workshops where their work will be edited and critiqued by other students in the class.

All readings will be available online.

Short Fiction

English 143A

Section: 1
Instructor: McFarlane, Fiona
Time: MW 9:30-11
Location: Wheeler 301

Description

A short fiction workshop with a focus on the craft of writing. In this course, we will be readers, writers, and editors of short fiction. We'll read a range of published short stories in order to explore the technical ways in which a short story is crafted, discussing topics like structure, point of view, conflict, detail, and dialogue. Each student will write and revise one significant story over the course of the semester. Students will read and edit each other's stories, write formal responses, and workshop the stories in class. Alongside these workshops, we'll discuss revision, publication, process, and practice. A course reader will be available for purchase.

Please note that access to this class is by application only.

To apply, submit a 7-15 page (double spaced) sample of your fiction. Complete stories preferred, but not required.

Verse

English 143B

Section: 1
Instructor: Giscombe, Cecil S.
Time: MW 5-6:30
Location: Wheeler 337

Description

There’ll be writing prompts and there’ll be experiments involving old forms—the sonnet, the ghazal, the haibun, varieties of orature (including song).

Old forms? From an essay: “I find [form] interesting as a site, as a point of disembarkation for talking about that other stuff, for the ongoing work of investigation and experiment. Sonnets can be navigated but the point, in all my classes, is not to get it right but to see how it feels to get involved in it, that and to look at what the poem (or the essay or joke or speech) does and at the ways the world presses on it, and at how it presses back on the world….. Of course it’s the wrestling [with the form] that’s important, the labor there, not the form so much. The form allows us to talk in class about the wrestling; it’s a thing, a topic, a place or place-holder in the never-ending conversation.”

Reading, weekly writing expectations, interrogation, argument, possible field trips and public events, "workshopping," "woodshedding," etc. Students will be responsible for leading discussions on the work of the fall Holloway poets (Rae Armantrout, Harmony Holiday, Feliz Lucia Molina, and Mona Lisa Saloy) and the book-list will include titles (TBA) by those poets.

Workshop participants will be asked to keep a dream journal.

Verse

English 143B

Section: 2
Instructor: Holiday, Harmony
Time: MW 12:30-2
Location: Wheeler 305

Description

Musician and poet Sun Ra once noted, after writing a requiem for a former band member this is the first time a black man received his very own requiem. We’ll be reading and writing and close listening to music with the elegiac in mind, studying comparative versions of elegies and requiem and odes. How does the human need to commemorate life and death and the glories and atrocities in between construct a poetics and a poet’s approach to language? We’ll read Fred Moten, Frank O’Hara, Lucie Brock-Boido, Kamau Brathwaite, Michael Harper, Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, and many others. We’ll close-listen to albums by Sun Ra, Miles Davis, Kendrick Lamar, Abbey Lincoln, Mary Lou Williams, Duke Ellington and others. We’ll try and unpack the idea that elegies are for the living, are documents aimed at resurrection as much as homage. We’ll examine how we constantly search for language that helps us say goodbye to the present and renew ourselves.

Long Narrative

English 143C

Section: 1
Instructor: McFarlane, Fiona
Time: MW 12:30-2
Location: Wheeler 301

Description

This course is for students who are interested in writing, or are already working on, a novel or novella. Through creative writing exercises, discussion and reading, we’ll generate ideas and explore how a novel is made; through workshops, you’ll share the beginning of your own project. By the end of the semester, you will have the first chapter or two of a novel- or novella-in-progress, and a sense of where to take your work next. Reading to be confirmed.

Please note that access to this class is by application only.

To apply, submit a 10-20 page (double spaced) sample of your fiction. This need not be a novel excerpt.

Special Topics: Form and Invention in Native American Literature

English 166

Section: 1
Instructor: Piatote, Beth
Time: MW 2-3
Location: Stanley 106

Description

Book List to come.

This course explores a wide range of literary production by Native American/Indigenous writers from the nineteenth century to present, drawing out the various linguistic and literary influences present in the works. The course is organized thematically around concepts such as language, protest, genre, animacy, and story to show both continuity and invention across time. The foundations of Indigenous languages, literacies, and forms will be emphasized, while also analyzing how Native American writers have consistently appropriated Western literary forms and styles to express a distinctive aesthetic. Course materials will include traditional stories in their own languages (with translation), poems, sermons, novels, short stories, plays, and speculative fiction.

Evaluation will be based on short papers and exams and a final research paper.

Literature and History: The Seventies

English 174

Section: 1
Instructor: Saul, Scott
Time: TuTh 3:30-5
Location: Wheeler 204

Book List

Kingston, Maxine Hong: The Woman Warrior; LeGuin, Ursula: The Dispossessed; Morrison, Toni: Song of Solomon

Description

As one writer quipped, it was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. “The Seventies” routinely come in for mockery as an era of bad taste — an era when enormous sideburns, leisure suits, extra-wide bell bottoms, pet rocks, and “diet” mackerel pudding made sense to all too many Americans. Even at the time, the 1970s were known as the decade when “it seemed like nothing happened.”

Yet we can see now that the ’70s was a time of great cultural renaissance and political ferment. It gave us the New Hollywood of Scorcese, Coppola and others; the “New Journalism” of Michael Herr, Joan Didion, and others; the music of funk, disco, punk and New Wave; the postmodern comedy of Saturday Night Live and the postmodern drama of Off-Off-Broadway; and a great range of literary fiction written by women authors from Ursula LeGuin and Margaret Atwood to Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston.

Rather than simply being a transitional period between the “liberal” 1960s and “conservative” 1980s, it was in fact a period of intense political realignment, with the United States roiled by the oil crisis, the fall of Nixon and the fall of Saigon; by the advent of women’s liberation, gay liberation, and environmentalism as mass grassroots movements; and by the rise of the Sunbelt and the dawning of the conservative revolution. One might even say that the ’70s were the most interesting decade of the post-WWII era — the period when the dreams of the ‘60s were most intensely, if achingly, fulfilled.

Lastly, the ’70s may be the decade closest to our own contemporary moment. We will consider how the roots of our current predicament lie in the earlier decade — with its backlash against movements for racial justice and gender equality, its gun culture, its corruption of the political process, its transition to a postindustrial economy, its widening inequality, its fetish for self-fulfillment, and its fascination with the appeal of instant celebrity. We will, in turn, reflect on how Americans in the ’70s struggled with many of the dilemmas that we face now.

Literature and Disability: States of Exception

English 175

Section: 1
Instructor: Langan, Celeste
Time: TuTh 12:30-2
Location: Moffitt 145

Book List

Coetzee, J.M.: Slow Man; Haddon, Mark: Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time; Kaminsky, Ilya: Deaf Republic; Keller, Helen: Story of My Life; Kleege, Georgina: Blind Rage; Melville, Herman: Billy Budd, Bartleby, and Other Stories; Oe, Kenzaburo: A Quiet Life; Rankine, Claudia: Don't Let Me Be Lonely

Description

From the blind poet to the fat detective to the “twisted” villain, literature often foregrounds bodily difference as an exceptional condition. What are the stakes and effects of literature’s interest in the exception—and in implied or engendered norms? What correspondences might there between different kinds of the atypical: between “beauty” and “deformity” (Adam calls Eve a “fair defect” in Paradise Lost), poetry and disfluency, over- and under-achievement? To address these and other questions, we’ll read a selection of texts that work at once to represent disability and to "crip" norms of representation. We’ll also consider disability in relation to disablement: the effects of impaired and impairing environments on the capacity to flourish.

Assignments will include two essays, a group or individual presentation project, and regular, thoughtful discussion posts. There will be no final exam, but regular attendance and participation are required. This is a core course for the disability studies minor.

Literature and Philosophy: Cults in Popular Culture

English 177

Section: 1
Instructor: Saha, Poulomi
Time: TuTh 5-6:30
Location: Physics Bldg 2

Description

We are fascinated by cults. What is it about communities and groups that promise total belief and total enthrallment that so captures the imagination?

This course will look at a range of representations of cults in popular culture—from the documentary Wild Wild Country to novels, journalistic exposés, and films—to consider what cults might tell us about society, politics, religion, and our sense of self. This class hopes to invite students who are ready to be themselves fascinated, enthralled, and perhaps entranced. One of the tasks before us will be to learn how to think critically in the face of that fascination. Engaging theories of psychology, sociology, and religion, we will examine how cults and their representation in popular culture reveal questions of desire, belonging, and self-effacement.

Students will also be asked to be ready to work collaboratively with one another over the course of the semester, building their own intentional community of sorts.

Films and readings may include Wild Wild Country, Holy Smokes: My Childhood in Orange, and Freud's Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego

Research Seminar: Ulysses

English 190

Section: 1
Instructor: Flynn, Catherine
Time: MW 5-6:30
Location: Wheeler 301

Description

This year marks the centenary of James Joyce’s Ulysses, widely considered the most important novel of the twentieth century. We will consider the book at a variety of scales: word, sentence, narrative strategy, and organizational structure. We will also consider it from a variety of perspectives: as an expression of the historical and political context of 1904 and of the years leading up to its publication in 1922, as a primary force in the ruptures and inventions of literary modernism, as a mirror and a harbinger of transformations in the social understanding of gender, sex, and the individual, and as the focus of evolving literary critical responses over the past hundred years,

Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.

Research Seminar: Nineteenth Century American Ecologies

English 190

Section: 3
Instructor: Bondy, Katherine Isabel
Time: MW 3:30-5
Location: 301 Wheeler

Book List

Douglass, Frederick: The Heroic Slave; Jewett, Sarah Orne: The Country of the Pointed Firs; Stoddard, Elizabeth: The Morgesons; Thaxter, Celia: Among the Shoals; Thoreau, Henry David: Walden; or, Life in the Woods

Description

What did “nature” mean in nineteenth-century America? How did writers, artists, and activists from the period represent and interact with the natural world around them? In this research seminar, we will approach these questions through the lens of what eco-critic Timothy Morton has termed “ecological thinking”: a recognition and thinking through of our interconnectness with the non-human environment. We will consider versions of “ecological thinking” from a diversity of nineteenth-century perspectives in order to test out its political, aesthetic, and ethical possibilities. Together, we will dig through the rich soil of nineteenth-century American ecological writing and ask what fruit it bears for thinking about the environmental crises of our contemporary moment.

Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.

Research Seminar: Material Dickinson

English 190

Section: 4
Instructor: François, Anne-Lise
Time: MW 11-12:30
Location: Wheeler 305

Description

This single author seminar will explore and compare the different kinds of textual materiality—manuscript, print, digital, and aural—in which Emily Dickinson’s writings have circulated. Questions will include: what are the ecological aspects of Dickinson’s poetry? What is Dickinson’s relation to translation? What role does meter play in distinguishing the poems from the letters in which they are embedded?

Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.

Research Seminar: 1922: Modernism's Year 1

English 190

Section: 5
Instructor: Blanton, C. D.
Time: MW 2-3:30
Location: Wheeler 337

Description

At the end of October 1921 (on his own birthday), writing in the small avant-garde magazine The Little Review, Ezra Pound declared a new calendar, celebrating the dawn of a new ‘Year 1’. This new calendar, he suggested, would be dated ‘p.s.U’, post scriptem Ulysses, from the completion of a work that had been appearing in serial form for several months, James Joyce’s Ulysses. In February 1922, Ulysses would be published in Paris, by Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare & Co., a book-shop on the Left Bank (on Joyce’s birthday). That event a century ago has stood as a landmark ever since, the most visible sign of a cultural annus mirabilis.

This course is about that year. But instead of reading Ulysses (students interested in doing so are directed to the parallel seminar being taught by Professor Catherine Flynn), we will attend to everything else that was happening in 1922, or at least as much of it as can be reasonably managed.

This includes some of the decisive events that would shape the interwar era. In January, the ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty triggered a civil war and laid the groundwork for what would become the Irish Free State. In February, Egypt claimed limited autonomy from the British Empire as well, but in March, Mohandas Gandhi was imprisoned for sedition in India.

In April, Joseph Stalin became the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party’s Central Committee; in December, Russia joined with Ukraine, Belarus, and several other republics to form the USSR (while Lenin wrote a will and urged that Stalin be removed from his post). Also in April, the Soviet government reached an agreement with the German Weimar Republic, in the Treaty of Rapallo, to renormalize diplomatic and economic relations. In June, Walter Rathenau, the German Foreign Minister who negotiated the agreement, was assasinated in Berlin by early fascist paramilitaries (a year later, associated groups would stage a failed putsch in Munich). In October, the Italian Fascist Party led the March on Rome and installed Benito Mussolini as prime minister.

Also in October, T. S. Eliot published The Waste Land, in the first number of a new review he called The Criterion. A month later, the British Broadcasting Corporation went on the air, Howard Carter opened the Tomb of Tutankhamen in Egypt, the Ottoman Empire was abolished, the Labour Party eclipsed the Liberal Party as the chief opposition in the British Parliament, and Marcel Proust died in Paris. Virginia Woolf published Jacob’s Room, her first novel in an incipiently experimental style, at the Hogarth Press. Ludwig Wittgenstein published the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and Bronislaw Malinowski published Argonauts of the Western Pacific.

Elsewhere, Gertrude Stein collected a series of her experimental writings as Geography and Plays. Jean Cocteau debuted a ‘contraction’ of Antigone, with sets designed by Pablo Picasso and starring Antonin Artaud. Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky joined the Bauhaus and its first full exhibition, where the remnants of Dada staged its funeral (before joining André Breton and Francis Picabia to formulate what would soon become Surrealism). Franz Kafka began The Castle, a book he would not finish. Pound himself moved to Italy and wrote the Malatesta Cantos; W. B. Yeats took a seat in the Irish Senate. Le Corbusier published a series of magazine articles that would lay the groundwork for the International Style. Arnold Schoenberg completed his ‘Suite for Piano’ (op. 25), the first piece composed entirely according to a serial system of twelve tones; his student Alban Berg completed Wozzeck, the first opera composed according to the same principle. F. W. Murnau released Nosferatu, Fritz Lang released Dr. Mabuse, Buster Keaton released Cops, and Robert J. Flaherty released Nanook of the North; meanwhile, Dziga Vertov developed a theory of ‘film-truth’ (Kino-Pravda) and Sergei Eisenstein formulated a theory of montage.

And so on. One could go on and still leave much out. We will not manage to account for all of it, nor will we try. But we will explore as much of it as we can: poetry, fiction, theater, painting, design, music, performance, architecture, film, philosophy, and more. That exploration will culminate in a final research project, in which students are encouraged to discover their own ways into modernism’s Year 1.

Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.

Research Seminar: Crisis and Culture: The 1930s, 1970s, and post-2008 in Comparative Perspective

English 190

Section: 6
Instructor: Lee, Steven S.
Time: TuTh 9:30-11
Location: Wheeler 301

Book List

Doctorow, E.L.: The Book of Daniel; Ma, Ling: Severance; West, Nathanael: The Day of the Locust; Wright, Richard: Native Son

Description

This research seminar will explore the impact of economic crisis and systemic transformation on symbolic authority and cultural production. To what extent is culture determined by economic forces, and to what extent is it separate from these forces? How do moments of crisis open new ways of theorizing culture—expanding or delimiting what we expect culture to accomplish in the world? To answer these questions, the seminar will focus on the last three major worldwide economic crises—the 1930s, the 1970s, and that which began in 2008 and continues to shape our lives. We will see how the 1930s witnessed what has been called the “laboring” of American culture, but also the emergence of cultural forms that advanced fascism in Europe. We will see how the 1970s witnessed the emergence of an ostensibly depoliticized “postmodern” culture, but also radical advances in cultural studies and critical race theory. Finally, we will explore the possibilities and limitations delivered by the most recent crisis and heightened by the pandemic.

Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.

Research Seminar: Medieval Sexualities

English 190

Section: 7
Instructor: Miller, Jennifer
Time: TuTh 5-6:30
Location: Wheeler 301

Description

Contact Jennifer Miller at j_miller@berkeley.edu for more information about this class.

Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.

Research Seminar: The Work of Ursula Le Guin

English 190

Section: 8
Instructor: Jones, Donna V.
Time: TuTh 5-6:30
Location: Evans 7

Book List

Le Guin, Ursula: The Dispossessed; Le Guin, Ursula: The Lathe of Heaven; Le Guin, Ursula: The Left Hand of Darkness; Le Guin, Ursula: The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula LeGuin; Le Guin, Ursula: The Word for World is Forest; Le Guin, Ursula: Worlds of Exile and Illusion: Three Complete Novels of the Hainish Series in One Volume

Description

“Science Fiction is often described, and even defined, as extrapolative. The science fiction writer is supposed to take a trend or phenomenon of the here-and-now, purify and intensify it for dramatic effect, and extend it into the future. “If this goes on, this is what will happen.” A prediction is made. … The outcome seems almost inevitably to be cancer. … Strictly extrapolative works of science fiction generally arrive about where the Club of Rome arrives: somewhere between human liberty and the total extinction of terrestrial life.”

This course will serve as a deep dive into the fantasy/science fiction work of Berkeley native Ursula LeGuin. As the quote conveys, LeGuin eschewed her peers' and contemporaries' extrapolative narratives and technological determinism. Her fantasies and science fiction dwelt on our imaginative capacity to make and undo the world through culture, custom, language, and technology. But foremost in her extensive oeuvre is the social. We will read a wide selection of LeGuin's novels, short stories, essays, and adaptations of LeGuin's fiction in film and other media. We will also address LeGuin's critics and interlocutors in an attempt to trace the long arc of her influence on genre fiction, traditional narrative fiction, and futurist writings.

Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.

Research Seminar: Modern California Books and Movies

English 190

Section: 9
Instructor: Starr, George A.
Time: MW 5-6:30
Location: Wheeler 300

Book List

Chandler, R.: The Big Sleep; Didion, J. : Slouching toward Bethlehem.; Steinbeck, J.: The Long Valley; Steinbeck, J.: The Pastures of Heaven

Description

Besides reading and discussing fiction and essays attempting to identify or explain distinctive regional characteristics, this course will include consideration of some movies shaped by and shaping conceptions of California. Writing will consist of a term paper of 16-20 pages. There will be no quizzes or exams, but seminar attendance and participation will be expected, and will affect grades.

Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.

Honors Course

English H195A

Section: 1
Instructor: Hale, Dorothy J.
Time: TuTh 11-12:30
Location: Wheeler 106

Description

H195 is a two-semester course that gives students the training they need to conduct original research and develop their findings into a successful scholarly essay, 40-60 pages in length.

Crucial to this enterprise is an understanding of interpretative methods. What kind of criticism will you practice? Which scholarly conversation will you seek to join? In the fall semester, students will learn about the theoretical frameworks that have helped shape literary study as it is now conducted. Since many of the assigned critical essays are also superb examples of effective argumentation, our consideration of method will also extend to writerly practices such as thesis construction, rhetorical techniques and uses of evidence.

The most important requirement for the course is curiosity. What would you like to know more about? What author, issue, or era would you like to spend a year thinking about? Some students begin the class with a strong intuition about what they might like to do; others are wrestling with two or three research ideas. These are happy problems and can be sorted out in consultation with the professor. But do not sign up for the Honors course if you can’t imagine immersing yourself in a topic of your own choosing for a full year.

By the beginning of October, research topics should be in place. You will be expected to work closely with the Humanities Librarian to develop expertise in navigating scholarly resources. A prospectus and bibliography are required by the end of the fall term.

Students who have completed the fall course requirements satisfactorily will receive the grade of IP for the fall term. Written work includes a short analysis of one of the assigned works of criticism. All written work for the fall will be graded.

In the spring semester, students organize into writing groups and meet regularly to help one another with their independent research. There are a few required meetings of the class as a whole, a modest amount of assigned reading, and no written work other than the Honors thesis. A complete draft of the thesis is due before spring break.

Students admitted to this section of the Honors Course should read over the summer How to Write a BA Thesis, 2^nd Edition, by Charles Lipson (Chicago UP). I will notify you when additional books have been ordered for the course.

Honors Course

English H195A

Section: 2
Instructor: Abel, Elizabeth
Time: TuTh 11-12:30
Location: Wheeler 305

Book List

Booth, Wayne: The Craft of Research; Booth, Wayne: The Craft of Research; Booth, Wayne: The Craft of Research; Booth, Wayne: The Craft of Research; Booth, Wayne: The Craft of Research; Booth, Wayne: The Craft of Research

Description

H195A/B is a two-semester seminar that lays the groundwork for and guides you through the completion a 40-60 page Honors thesis on a subject of your choice. The first semester offers an inquiry into critical approaches, research methods, and theoretical frameworks. We will engage with some of the key theoretical movements and debates of the twentieth century (e.g., New Criticism, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, materialism[s], feminism, postcolonial and critical race theory, affect theory). We will ground our collective inquiry in readings of a few primary texts that highlight the questions posed by specific genres. The goal is to help you to define a compelling research project that will sustain your interest over several months, to conceptualize and contextualize the critical questions that enlist your keenest curiosity, to engage with secondary materials productively, to articulate the stakes of your inquiry, and to develop a persuasive critical voice and argument.

I encourage you to think about potential thesis projects over the summer. Ideally, you will have narrowed the field to a couple of options by the start of fall semester. In addition to the assigned readings, the work for that semester will entail some preliminary research, thinking, and writing that will culminate in a thesis proposal and annotated bibliography by the semester’s end.

During the spring semester students will meet with me in individual conferences and share preliminary drafts in working groups. Portions of the thesis will be submitted for feedback at regular intervals. A draft of the entire thesis will be due in early April; the final version will be due in early May.

Graduate Courses

Graduate students from other departments and exceptionally well-prepared undergraduates are welcome in English graduate courses (except for English 200 and 375) insofar as limitations of class size allow. Graduate courses are usually limited to 15 students; courses numbered 250 are usually limited to 10.

When demand for a graduate course exceeds the maximum enrollment limit, the instructor will determine priorities for enrollment and inform students of his/her decisions at the second class meeting. Prior enrollment does not guarantee a place in a graduate course that turns out to be oversubscribed on the first day of class; fortunately, this situation does not arise very often.

Problems in the Study of Literature

English 200

Section: 1
Instructor: Gang, Joshua
Time: MW 11-12:30
Location: Wheeler 337

Description

This seminar introduces students to the practices of professional literary study. Our focus will be three of our discipline's most fundamental concerns: textual criticism and editing; the production, circulation, and reception of texts; and theories of interpretation. We will not only examine the methods entailed by these modes of inquiry—asking what makes a particular approach meaningful and why—but also put such methods into practice. Students will write papers that speak to these different critical modes as well as a culminating final paper. These final papers will be presented to the department at a day-long symposium at the end of the semester.

Enrollment is limited to first-year students in the English department's doctoral program. No auditors will be permitted.

Topics in the Structure of the English Language: Meter

English 201A

Section: 1
Instructor: Hanson, Kristin
Time: TuTh 5-6:30
Location: Wheeler 306

Book List

Booth (ed), Stephen : Shakespeare's Sonnets

Description

This course offers an introduction to meter from the perspective of theoretical linguistics. Fundamental to this approach is the assumption that any meter is shaped, sometimes consciously and sometimes not, not only by the meter’s own language(s), but also by the human mind’s capacity for language in general, particularly as it pertains to rhythm.

We will begin by considering what is probably the most influential and thoroughly studied meter in modern English, the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, formalizing its constraints on syllables, stress, and phrasing, its range of variation, and its artistic possibilities. From there, depending on students’ interests, we will turn to some of its predecessors in French, Italian, Old English and Latin, and to some of its companions and successors in modern English, such as looser forms of iambic pentameter (including some of Shakespeare in other genres), and so-called “strong-stress” meters such as the influential and challenging “Sprung Rhythm” of Hopkins. Finally, if time permits, we will consider some aspects of how meter in poetry is like and unlike rhythmic forms in music.

Throughout, the focus will be on helping students conceptualize and contextualize meter(s) of poet(s) they themselves are studying. A sequence of assignments designed to support that will be the principal requirement of the course, leading to a short final paper.

No prior training in linguistics or metrics is required.

Graduate Readings: Transcendentalists and Pragmatists

English 203

Section: 2
Instructor: Tamarkin, Elisa
Time: Th 11-2
Location: Wheeler 301

Description

The course will trace genealogies of American thought from transcendentalism through pragmatism. In the first half, we will focus on the life in letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson and on Emerson’s relationship to the intellectual and social history of the movement he defined. Reading Emerson alongside Henry David Thoreau and others, we’ll look at transcendentalism as a program for abolition, for labor reform, for public intellectualism, for education, for environmentalism, and for new experiments in reading, writing, and living. We will keep in mind efforts to define and detract from transcendentalism on religious grounds and also efforts to see the movement as engaged with Kant, Coleridge, and Carlyle (and as engaging Nietzsche) on ideas of perception, consciousness, and experience, and as an American answer to philosophical thinking. In the second half of the seminar, we will try to understand what pragmatism takes from transcendentalism—to see where the histories of these ideas converge and depart—while also putting transcendentalists into conversation with process philosophers and phenomenologists a century later. Our discussions will focus on William James primarily, but also works by John Dewey, Alain Locke, and Alfred North Whitehead.

Graduate Readings: Prospectus Workshop

English 203

Section: 3
Instructor: Abel, Elizabeth
Time: Th 2-5
Location: Wheeler 301

Book List

Recommended: Hayot, Eric: The Elements of Academic Style; Hayot, Eric: The Elements of Academic Style

Description

This will be a hands-on writing workshop intended to facilitate and accelerate the transition from qualifying exams to prospectus conference, from prospectus conference to first dissertation chapter, and from the status of student to that of independent scholar. The workshop provides a collaborative critical community in which to try out successive versions of your dissertation project and to learn how your peers are constructing theirs. We will review a range of prospectuses from the past to demystify the genre and to gain a better understanding of its form and function.

Writing assignments are designed to structure points of entry into the prospectus: although some of the early assignments may be more immediately relevant to certain projects than to others, they all have the benefit of facilitating the passage from concepts to writing according to a series of deadlines. Beginning with exercises to galvanize your thinking, the assignments will map increasingly onto the specific components of the prospectus as the semester proceeds. The goal is to insure that by the end of the semester, every member of the workshop will have submitted a prospectus to his or her committee.

Graduate Readings: Modernism and the Public Sphere

English 203

Section: 4
Instructor: Flynn, Catherine
Time: TuTh 3:30-5
Location: Wheeler 337

Description

A series of works in the last twenty years has complicated the notion that modernism is characterized by a preoccupation with interiority, arguing for public culture as a crucial space for the construction of modernism. This course asks how modernist interiority and technologies of dissemination affect one another and how this changes our understanding of the politics of the movement. We will consider modernist works with Jürgen Habermas’s concept of the public sphere, in which multiple registers and perspectives encounter one another in an open and democratic realm of discourse. How can an investigation of modernists’ staging and undermining of normative or ideal speech situations inform our understanding of modernist language and of the political capacities of the movement? Our discussion will address novels, plays, poems, manifestos, little magazines, newspaper columns, radio plays and addresses, cartoons, and films by figures including Samuel Beckett, André Breton, Alfred Jarry, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Flann O’Brien, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, H. G. Wells, and W. B. Yeats.

Chaucer

English 211

Section: 1
Instructor: Nolan, Maura
Time: MW 5-6:30
Location: 212 Wheeler

Description

English 211 will be taught in tandem with English 111. Graduate students will attend the English 111 lectures, but will also be responsible for joining a once-a-week discussion section, for additional primary and secondary readings, a class presentation, and two medium-length essays.

Poetry Writing Workshop

English 243B

Section: 1
Instructor: Giscombe, Cecil S.
Time: MW 12:30-2
Location: Wheeler 337

Book List

Coultas, Brenda: Marvelous Bones of Time; Field, Thalia: Bird Lovers, Backyard; Taylor, Catherine: Apart; Trethewey, Natasha: Native Guard

Description

This fall I’m going to ask that poetry workshop members join me in reading and thinking about location as an active process and about cross-genre writing as a response to and engagement with that process. Those are my particular—though by no means exclusive—interests for the fall and workshop people will be encouraged to work out of their own necessities. The booklist: The Marvelous Bones of Time, by Brenda Coultas; Bird Lovers, Backyard, by Thalia Field; Apart, by Catherine Taylor; and Native Guard, by Natasha Trethewey. Writing prompts, field trips, "worshopping," much conversation.

Workshop participants will be asked to keep a dream journal.

Graduate Proseminars (Renaissance)

English 246C

Section: 1
Instructor: Marno, David
Time: W 2-5
Location: Wheeler 305

Description

According to one of the most influential, and contested, theories of modernity, our life in capitalism and bureaucratic rationality began in the early modern period “when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality.” In this course, we ask how or indeed whether 16th-century literature fits in with Max Weber’s theory of the Protestant Reformation bringing about the disenchantment of the world. Did the worldly poetry of Thomas Wyatt or Philip Sidney precipitate the secularization Weber talks about? Should we read the psalm translations of Anne Locke or Mary Sidney as some of the earliest attempts at re-enchantment by literature? Or do the literary cultures that emerged between Thomas More’s Utopia and his great-grandnephew John Donne’s satires tell an altogether different story?

The plan of the course is to consider a little bit of prose and drama but keep our main focus on poetry; however, the reading schedule will have the flexibility to accommodate texts students would like to read in the context of the course.

Research Seminars: Freud

English 250

Section: 1
Instructor: Lavery, Grace
Time: T 9-12
Location: Wheeler 337

Description

In this course, we will read (most of) the works of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, and little else. This will mean studying the changing models of consciousness; theories of dream interpretation, parapraxis, and libido; accounts of analytic technique and clinical practice; critical papers on literature, drama, music, and art; forays into ethnography, Biblical exegesis, and theology; case studies of neurosis, phobia, hysteria, and psychosis; and portions of Freud’s voluminous correspondence. Readings will be conducted in English; the class is designed for those who wish to read Freud as humanists—which is to say for its literary, conceptual, and philosophical dimensions—but we will welcome clinicians and psychologists should any wish to attend.

The Teaching of Composition and Literature

English 375

Section: 1
Instructor: Lee, Steven S.
Time: Tu 1-3 pm
Location: Wheeler 337

Description

Co-taught by a faculty member and a graduate student instructor (the department's R & C Assistant Coordinator), this course introduces new English GSIs to the practice and theory of teaching literature and writing at UC Berkeley in sections linked to English 45 and select upper-division courses, as well in R1A and R1B, and beyond. At once a seminar and a hands-on practicum, the class will cover topics such as strategies for leading discussion, teaching critical reading skills and the elements of composition, responding to and evaluating student writing, developing paper topics and other exercises, and approaching the other responsibilities that make up the work of teaching here and elsewhere.